Skip to main content

When Justice Fails

By Anonymous
In my last post, I reviewed Professor David Dow’s Confessions of an Innocent Man, which I summarized as “a story about love and hatred, innocence and guilt, friendship and animosity, forgiveness and condemnation, hope and hopelessness, coping and failing to cope [and]… a story about the many, mixed, and devastating emotions associated with the loss of a partner, the loss of freedom, and the loss of normalcy all at once [and]… a story about relationships—those accepted and denounced, broken and repaired, real and perceived, unlikely and purposeful, traditional and extraordinary… [and, finally]… a story about the numerous inefficacies of our criminal justice system and the devastating tolls paid by those wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death.” Dow’s novel is a fascinating read, yet it leaves us with many questions about the failures of our current system and the implications of wrongful convictions.

When Justice Fails: Causes and Consequences of Wrongful Convictions, written by social science researchers and legal actors with significant knowledge of wrongful convictions and the release of thousands of innocent prisoners in the U.S. in past decades, helps to provide a more practical look at these issues and to produce new insights regarding how and why wrongful convictions occur and what can be done to help prevent further injustices in our criminal justice system.

In sum, When Justice Fails surveys the field of innocence scholarship to offer an overview of the key research, legal, and policy issues associated with wrongful convictions. Topics include the leading sources of error, the detection and correction of miscarriages of justice, the aftermath of wrongful convictions, and more. The volume includes references to historic and contemporary instances of miscarriages of justice and presents information gleaned from media sources about the cases and related policy issues. This book will be of interest to anyone seeking to learn more about wrongful convictions and the administration of justice or anyone searching for an instructive follow-up to Confessions of an Innocent Man.

When Justice Fails is now available on the New Books shelf, and its contents can be previewed here.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Amazing, but True, Deportation Story of Carlos Marcello

By
Earlier this week, the University of Houston Law Center was fortunate to have as its guest Professor Daniel Kanstroom of Boston College of Law. An expert in immigration law, he is the Director of the International Human Rights Program, and he both founded and directs the Boston College Immigration and Asylum Clinic. Speaking as the guest of the Houston Journal of International Law’s annual Fall Lecture Series, Professor Kanstroom discussed issues raised in his new book, Aftermath: Deportation Law and the New American Diaspora . Professor Michael Olivas introduced Professor Kanstroom to the audience, and mentioned the fascinating tale of Carlos Marcello, which Professor Kanstroom wrote about in his chapter “The Long, Complex, and Futile Deportation Saga of Carlos Marcello,” in Immigration Stories , a collection of narratives about leading immigration law cases. My interest piqued, I read and was amazed by Kanstroom’s description of one of the most interesting figures in American le...
1 comment
Read more

Texas Subsequent History Table Ceases Publication

By
This week, Thomson Reuters notified subscribers that publication of the Texas Subsequent History Table will be discontinued and no further updates will be produced, due to “insufficient market interest.” Practitioners have been extracting writ (and since 1997, petition) history from the tables since their initial publication in 1917 as The Complete Texas Writs of Error Table . The tables, later published by West, have been used for nearly a century to determine how the Texas Supreme Court or Court of Criminal Appeals disposed of an appeal from an intermediate appellate court. The purpose of adding this notation to citations is to indicate the effect of the Texas Supreme Court’s action on the weight of authority of the Court of Appeals’ opinion.  For example, practitioners may prefer to use as authority a case that the Texas Supreme Court has determined is correct both in result and legal principles applied (petition refused), rather than one that simply presents no error that requ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Lessons for Today from the Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda

By Anonymous
“Man’s inhumanity to man is not only perpetrated by the vitriolic actions of those who are bad. It is also perpetrated by the vitiating inaction of those who are good.” –Martin Luther King Jr.   Last week, I had the pleasure of attending  Professor Zachary D. Kaufman ’s presentation on  Lessons for Today from the Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda  hosted by the  Johannesburg Holocaust & Geno cide Ce ntre . Among the many takeaways highlighted by Professor Kaufman and drawn from  Lessons from Rwanda: Post-Genocide Law and Policy   were ten simple yet profound lessons:   Lesson #1: Hate speech is dangerous.   To illustrate the role that hate speech played in the Rwandan genocide, Professor Kaufman discussed multiple forms of  propaganda , such as Kangura, Radio Rwanda, and RTLM “hate radio.”   He concludes that we must have limits, including with respect to social media, and further asserts that social media must do a better jo...
Post a Comment
Read more